Winter tyres for Nissan X-TRAIL

As you might know, there are winter and summer tyres. The lack of awareness of this fact in the UK is quite surprising. Winter tyres behave better than summer tyres when the temperature is below 7 degrees centigrade - the difference can be seen on slush, ice, frost and even wet roads. That is because summer tyres harden at lower temperatures and they lose their characteristics, such as grip on the road and ability to stop. It is caused by the rubber compound - winter tyres are made of softer compound, so they don't harden when the temperature is bellow 7 degrees centigrade, therefore they are more flexible. It works both ways - in summer, winter tyres wear out more quickly, so it's probably a good idea to change tyres twice a year. One can argue that this is very expensive - well, it isn't, simply because two sets of tyres wear out two times slower than one set of tyres. The only extra cost you have is for changing tyres. And if you have two sets of wheels, you can change it at home.
As I said, winter tyres provide much more grip in cold conditions, even for Nissan X-TRAIL . Breaking from 30 mph on snow can také extra 26 feet, which is the length of two vehicles. The difference is even bigger when breaking on ice - when breaking from approximately 20 mph, the car with summer tyres stops 36 feet after the one with winter tyres. From a different angle of view, you can safe a lot of money on repair costs with winter tyres simply by not crashing your car in winter on summer tyres. In UK, you should switch to winter tyres in October and switch back in April. If you are reluctant to change tyres, we recommend using all season tyres. In winter, battery in your car suffers more and can die. Looking for a replacement? Try car battery for Nissan X-TRAIL on carbat.eu.

All season tyres

The truth is all season tyres don't provide as much grip in winter as the best winter tyres do. But they are a good compromise - if we look at the numbers, the winning all season tyre - Goodyear Vector 4Seasons (Autobild testing 2012) managed to stop on snow from 40km/h after 17.9 meters, the winter tyre stopped after 16.5 meters. There is still a small difference, but it's acceptable, when you consider that summer tyre stopped at the same conditions after long 33.3 meters. One might argue that winter conditions are on the roads for a few days in a year, so what is really important is dry and wet grip. In the wet, the all season Goodyear was just in the middle between winter and summer tyre, stopping after 2 meters after the summer one (stopping from 100km/h). In dry conditions, it was a similiar story - first summer tyre, second all season tyre (+5 meters), third winter tyre(+7 meters). To sum up, if you don't want to change tyres twice a year, the all season tyre is probably much better idea for your Nissan than summer tyre, which usually fails on snow completely.

Summer tyres

As we stated, we are not fans of using summer tyres in winter conditions. But when it comes to choosing summer tyres for Nissan X-TRAIL , you should choose very wisely. That's why we provide you ADAC tyre tests, which are in our opinion the best tyre tests in Europe. They cover a wide range of critieria, including wet handling, dry handling, noise, fuel saving etc. As we said earlier, summer tyres are made of harder compound and they work best when the temperature is higher than 7 degrees centigrade.
A common argument against winter tyres is four-wheel drive (4x4) - lot of people think that AWD cars don't need winter tyres. Well, they do - on snow, without winter tyres, even 4x4 can't help you not to get stuck.

How to find my tyre size?

The easiest way to find your tyre size is to read it from a sidewall of your current tyre. Also, you should be able to read it from the vehicle registration documents.